NEW YORK – Irene Prusik has been dead for six years. But in April, someone showed up at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Brooklyn to renew her driver's license. The explanation given by prosecutors rivals the Hitchcock classic "Psycho": It was her son, in drag.

Thomas Parkin, 49, was charged Wednesday in the bizarre plot to impersonate his deceased mother so he could collect $117,000 in government benefits. He and the man accused of being his accomplice, Mhilton Rimolo, pleaded not guilty to grand larceny, criminal impersonation and other charges.

Both men were ordered held on $1 million bail. Their lawyers did not immediately respond to phone messages left on Wednesday. District Attorney Charles Hynes said the scam was "unparalleled in its scope and brazenness."

Authorities claim that following his arrest, Parkin told them that because he held Prusik when she breathed her last breath, "I am my mother." Parkin, who lived with his mother, was accused of hatching the scheme after she passed away in 2003 at age 73. He managed to conceal the death by falsifying her death certificate, then collected $52,000 from her $700-a-month Social Security checks over the next six years, prosecutors said.

Authorities say Parkin also got another $65,000 in rent subsidies by falsely claiming he had a disability and that his mother was still alive andwas his landlord.

Parkin used his friend Rimolo to pose as the mother's nephew when going to cash checks and do other business, prosecutors said. A security camera photo from the DMV office shows a frail-looking Parkin in a wig and dark glasses, Rimolo by hisside, as he fills out paperwork.

The ruse began to unravel amid a dispute over the mother's home, which was sold at foreclosure in 2003. Parkin challenged the purchase by suing the new owner on his mother's behalf so he wouldn't be evicted.

As the property dispute dragged out, both sides eventually contacted the district attorney to accuse each other of fraud. By the time investigators arranged a meeting with the family in May, they already had proof Prusik was dead: a photo of her tombstone in a local cemetery.

The investigators played along as Parkin showed up for the interview "wearing a red cardigan, lipstick, manicured nails and breathingthrough an oxygen tank," prosecutors said.

ALSIP, Ill. – Three gravediggers and a cemetery manager unearthed hundreds of corpses from a historic black cemetery south of Chicago, dumping some in a weeded area and double-stacking others in existing graves, in an elaborate scheme to resell the plots, authorities said Thursday. All four were charged with felonies.

Frantic relatives of the deceased descended on Burr Oak Cemetery — the final resting place of lynching victim Emmett Till and blues singers Willie Dixon and Dinah Washington — in hopes someone could tell them their loved ones' remains were not among the pile of bones that littered a remote area of the property in Alsip, 12 miles south of Chicago.

Some found apparently undisturbed plots, but others wandered, unable to locate loved ones.

"This is a mess. We can't find our people," said Ralph Gunn, 54, of Chicago, who filled out a report for authorities after a futile search for the headstones of his brother and nephew.

Others cried and clutched cemetery maps as they waited for a chance to look themselves. They listened as Sheriff Tom Dart said the displacement of bodies "was not done in a very delicate way," and that remains were dumped haphazardly, littered with shards of coffins. For graves stacked on top of each other, Dart said it appears they "pounded the other one down and put someone on top."

A visibly shaken Rev. Jesse Jackson voiced the mounting anger at those who would toss the bones of the dead like trash.

"In my judgment, there should be no bail for them, there should be really a special place in hell for these graveyard thieves who have done so much, hurt these families," he said.

By late afternoon, orange flags marking grave sites that might have been disturbed could be seen throughout the 150-acre cemetery, where as many as 1,000 burials are held a year. Officials took phone numbers and told family members they would call within 72 hours. Dart said FBI agents would help sort through evidence and identify bodies and that it could be months before investigators fully understand what took place.

"I feel betrayed and violated," said Gregory Mannie, 54, a Chicagoan with four relatives buried at Burr Oak. Mannie was particularly worried about his grandmother, whose grave is in a more secluded area he did not visit as often as the others. He grew suspicious when he saw it Thursday — it seemed too clean.

"It's almost like killing them all over again," Mannie said.

The suspects, all of whom are black, were identified as Carolyn Towns, 49, Keith Nicks, 45, and Terrence Nicks, 39 — all of Chicago — and Maurice Dailey, 61, of Robbins. They each have been charged with one count of dismembering a human body, a felony.

Bond was set at $250,000 for Towns, the cemetery's manager, and at $200,000 for the other three.

Authorities said Towns also pocketed donations she elicited for an Emmett Till memorial museum. She has not been charged in connection with those allegations. Court documents show she was fired from the cemetery in late May amid allegations of financial wrongdoing.

Cook County state's attorney's office spokeswoman Tandra Simonton said Towns is being represented by a private attorney, but Simonton did not know the attorney's name. The Cook County public defender's office said it had not yet assigned attorneys to the other three cases.

The investigation was prompted in May, when a groundskeeper discovered skeletal remains in the part of the cemetery that wasn't supposed to be used, and cemetery officials notified Alsip police. Around the same time, the cemetery's Arizona-based owner, Perpetua Inc., called Cook County authorities to report the alleged financial wrongdoing.

Towns allegedly took cash for new graves, then instructed the three gravediggers to empty existing plots and move the remains inside to an unused part of the cemetery covered with chest-high grass and dotted with trees.

Perpetua Inc., said in a statement Thursday that the company is cooperating with investigators.

"We will make every attempt to insure and maintain the dignity of those that have been entrusted to our care," the company said.

It's the second time in recent years that Burr Oak has been at the center of an investigation. In 2005, the body of the 14-year-old Till, whose slaying in 1955 in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman helped galvanize the civil rights movement, was exhumed as part of a reopened investigation of his death.

Dart said Till's grave was not disturbed in the alleged plot-selling scheme, but he did not have information about the graves of Washington and others.

One of Till's cousins who lived at the Mississippi home where Till had been staying when he was killed and witnessed the teen being dragged away by two white men, called the Burr Oak scandal "horrific."

"To me, it's just as bad as it was the night they took Emmett," Wheeler Parker said. "Emmett's thing sounded like a nightmare and a dream, and this is the same thing."

skinman {kan}Member

Number of posts : 3169Age : 72City/Country : over here&nbsp : Clan Member

CATS have a power over their owners - and they know it. Scientist havediscovered our feline friends use a special blend of sounds to evokedeep emotional responses from their human companions.

Cats coax their owners into giving them what they want with a special purr thatblends their comforting soft, low sound with a high-pitched element -very similar to that found in a human baby's cry - that is hard toignore.

Cats incorporate this high-pitch sound into their normal, contendedpurr to exploit the nurturing instincts of humans for their own needs -usually to get fed, according to scientists.

Lead author Dr Karen McComb of Sussex University in southern England said she initiated the study after being repeatedly woken up in the morningsby her own cat, Pepo.

"I wondered why this purring sounded so annoying and was sodifficult to ignore. Talking with other cat owners, I found that someof them - including co-author Anna Taylor - also had cats who showedsimilar behaviour," she said.

McComb and her team tested human responses to different purringtypes, including "solicitation" purrs - which included thehigh-frequency element and were made by hungry cats - against"non-solicitation" or normal purrs.

"When humans were played purrs recorded while cats were activelyseeking food at equal volume to purrs recorded in non-solicitationcontexts, even those with no experience of cats judged thesolicitation' purrs to be more urgent and less pleasant," she said.

When the team re-synthesised the purrs to remove the embedded cry, the urgency ratings decreased significantly.

McComb concluded that the cats were using the special purr to maketheir views known without risking irritating humans with an overt meow.

However, this solution appears only to work in cats livingone-on-one with their owners -- cats in large households usually haveto meow to be heard.

Lady of Winter {KAN}Queen of the P90 - shooter of the AK47. Claymore expert

MOUNT PLEASANT, Wis. – One southern Wisconsin homeowner is probably not in love with the Oscar Mayer wiener. The famed hot dog's Wienermobile crashed Friday into the deck and garage of a home in Mount Pleasant, about 35 miles south of Milwaukee.

Policesaid the driver was trying to turn the Wienermobile around in thedriveway and thought she was moving in reverse. But she instead wentforward and hit the home. It sat in the driveway as if it were stuck inthe garage Friday afternoon.

No one was home and no one was injured. No citations were immediately issued. Both the home and vehicle suffered moderate damage, which Oscar Mayer spokeswoman Sydney Lindner says insurance will cover.

Police hadn't been able to speak to the homeowner as of early Friday evening.

GREENACRES, Fla. – Authorities caught a Lake Worthman running down the street with a stolen cash register. Greenacrespolice reported that a 32-year-old man entered a restaurant Thursday afternoonand asked for change for a $10 bill. When the cashier asked to see thebill, the man reportedly began screaming, "I want change!"

Police said the man then grabbed about $40 from a tip box, picked up the cash register containing nearly $300 and ran out.

The officers who arrested the suspect after a short chase had just comefrom reviewing surveillance footage at a nearby connivence store, wherelottery tickets had been stolen a day earlier. By chance, the officersidentified the man as the thief from the footage.

The man was being held on $21,000 bail for multiple charges.

Lady of Winter {KAN}Queen of the P90 - shooter of the AK47. Claymore expert

In a daring experiment in Europe, scientists used mosquitoes as flying needles to deliver a "vaccine" of live malaria parasites through their bites. The results were astounding: Everyone in the vaccine group acquired immunity to malaria; everyone in a non-vaccinated comparison group did not, and developed malaria when exposed to the parasites later.

The study was only a small proof-of-principle test, and its approach is not practical on a large scale. However, it shows that scientists may finally be on the right track to developing an effective vaccineagainst one of mankind's top killers. A vaccine that uses modified live parasites just entered human testing.

"Malaria vaccines are moving from the laboratory into the real world," Dr. Carlos Campbell wrote in an editorial accompanying the study in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. He works for PATH, the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, a Seattle-based global health foundation. The new study "reminds us that the whole malaria parasite is the most potent immunizing" agent, even though it is harder to develop a vaccine this way and other leading candidates take a different approach, he wrote.

Malaria kills nearly a million people each year, mostly children under 5 and especially in Africa. Infected mosquitoes inject immature malaria parasites into the skin when they bite; these travel to the liver where they mature and multiply. From there, they enter the bloodstream and attack red blood cells — the phase that makes people sick.

People can develop immunity to malaria if exposed to it many times. The drug chloroquine can kill parasites in the final bloodstream phase, when they are most dangerous.

Scientists tried to take advantage of these two factors, by using chloroquine to protect people while gradually exposing them to malaria parasites and letting immunity develop.

They assigned 10 volunteers to a "vaccine" group and five others to a comparison group. All weregiven chloroquine for three months, and exposed once a month to about a dozen mosquitoes — malaria-infected ones in the vaccine group and non-infected mosquitoes in the comparison group.

That was to allow the "vaccine" effect to develop. Next came a test to see if it was working. All15 stopped taking chloroquine. Two months later, all were bitten by malaria-infected mosquitoes. None of the 10 in the vaccine group developed parasites in their bloodstreams; all five in the comparisongroup did.

The study was done in a lab at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and was funded by two foundations and a French government grant.

"This is not a vaccine" as in a commercial product, but a way to show how whole parasites can be used like a vaccine to protect against disease, said one of the Dutch researchers, Dr. Robert Sauerwein. "It'smore of an in-depth study of the immune factors that might be able to generate a very protective type of response," said Dr. John Treanor, a vaccine specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, N.Y., who had no role in the study.

The concept already is in commercial development. A company in Rockville, Md. — Sanaria Inc. — is testing a vaccine using whole parasites that have been irradiated to weaken them, hopefully keeping them in an immature stage in the liver to generate immunity but not cause illness.

Two other reports in the New England Journal show that resistance is growing to artemisinin, the main drug used against malaria in the many areas where chloroquine is no longer effective. Studies in Thailand and Cambodia found the malaria parasite is less susceptible to artemisinin, underscoring the urgent need to develop a vaccine.

Lady of Winter {KAN}Queen of the P90 - shooter of the AK47. Claymore expert

WELLINGTON (Reuters) – An extremely drunk, naked man lost his way at a New Zealand hotel and ended up sleeping in the wrong room, forcing its female occupant to hide in the bathroom, local media reported.

The 29 year-old Australian man had gone back the hotel in the resort town of Queenstown with a woman, but got up in the night and wandered into a bedroom where a couple were sleeping. "He was a bit surprised that there were two people in his room and he was butt naked," Sergeant Steve Watt of Queenstown police told the Southland Times.

As the intruder slept, the startled woman took refuge in the bathroom as her husband summoned hotel staff.

The man, who could not remember whom he had been with nor what room he had been in, and had no clothes or wallet.Police gave him a ride home clad in a hotel bathrobe, but let him off after the guests and hotel decided not to press charges.

"It was far too funny," said Watt.

Lady of Winter {KAN}Queen of the P90 - shooter of the AK47. Claymore expert

CLEVELAND – Police said a Cleveland barber became so upset by whathe considered bad beef jerky that he returned to the store where hebought it and tried to rob the owner. Police said the 28-year-oldbarber walked into the store where he bought the snack, just two doorsdown from his barbershop, and tried to rob the owner Thursday night.

The owner told the man he recognized him and chased him outside with a baseball bat. The first police officer who arrived on the scene was also familiar with the barber because he cuts the officer's hair.

Police arrested the man at his girlfriend's house a few miles away. The barber told police the stick of beef jerky he bought sickened him and his dog.

Lady of Winter {KAN}Queen of the P90 - shooter of the AK47. Claymore expert

A four-time gold medalist subdued and help capture a teenage intruder at her home in Australia. It's a pretty impressive story before you consider that the would-be victim won the first of those gold medals in 1956.Dawn Fraser, who won eight Olympic medals for Australia from 1956 through 1964, was at a home in Australia when a man grabbed her by the front gate. Bad idea.

"This guy came out of the gate and grabbed me and I grabbed him by the ear and I kicked him in the groin.So he had to let me go. He threatened my life and I got really annoyed about that and just grabbed him by the ear and the hair."

Grabbing an ear and kicking a groin? That sounds like a scene from a Three Stooges movie. It's bad enough to be a burglar. It's bad enoughto be a bad burgler. But to be a bad burglar that gets caught after being kicked in the groin by a 71-year old? Ouch, on multiple levels. Fraser'sattitude doesn't seem to have changed from her swimming days. She was always considered cocky (especially when she broke the Australianrecord in the 100m freestyle and told reporters that she wasn't impressed with her time) and once smacked a teammate with a pillowduring an argument at a team meeting.While Fraser said she was "annoyed" with the intruder, she couldn't be too angry, since she has dabbled in some intruding herself. At the 1964 Tokyo Games, Fraser went on a middle-of-the-night raid to steal a flag from the entrance to the Emperor's palace. She was caught and arrested, but was released soon after and given the flag anyway.

DeFUNIAK SPRINGS, Fla. – A judge ruled that constant exposure to hairspray setoff a teen's alcohol monitoring device — not consumption of alcohol.Based on evidence presented Thursday, Judge Kelvin Wells said hewouldn't revoke the pre-trial release of a 17-year-old teen. The teenwas wearing the anklet under a court order. The device issued an alert in July after three separate readings showed she had alcohol in her system. The teen works at a hair salonand her attorney argued that hairspray triggered the alert. Aco-founder of the anklet testified that certain products — includingperfumes and cleaning products — can trigger a false alert.

She's charged with DUI manslaughter and DUI with serious bodily injury. Her trial is scheduled to begin in January.

skinman {kan}Member

Number of posts : 3169Age : 72City/Country : over here&nbsp : Clan Member

The film is shot documentary style (but is scripted, like "BlairWitch"), and concerns a couple who may have a poltergeist in theirhome. They're dubious at first, but quickly change their tunes after"things" start happening. But by then is it too late? After all, horrormovies have a tendency to punish doubters as much as amorous teenagers.

One of the things that makes "Paranormal Activity" unique is itsrelease schedule. Right now, the film is only being screened in ahandful of theaters. However, if moviegoers make enough noise and bugthe studio bigwigs, the film may get a wider release. Wisely, thefilmmakers have made it easy for fans to voice their demand. A visit tothe movie's official site leads to a form that goes to theater owners. Power to the people.

And then there's the trailer -- "Paranormal Activity" did somethingunique in that the trailer aims the camera at a special sneak previewaudience reacting to what they're seeing on screen. The moviegoersscream, jump, and generally turn into blubbering messes of terror. It'swhat every horror fan wants to see.

Lookups on "paranormal activity" are up a whopping 450% this week, and related queries on "paranormal activity trailer" are also trending upwards. Feeling brave? You can watch it for yourself below...Watch the Trailer for 'Paranormal Activity'

COLUMBIA STATION, Ohio – An Ohio bride and ghoul have vowed to love each other and haunt and howl at the moon together at a Halloween-themed wedding. Sixty-one-year-old Jack Holsinger and 44-year-old Connie Spitznagel were both made up as pale-faced vampires for their scare-emoney Saturday night at a haunted house near Cleveland. The two chose the location because it's operated by the same people who own a campground where the couple met.

Holsinger arrived in a coffin inside a hearse, and the coffin was carried to the altar by six pallbearers. Minister Greg Kopp was dressed as Jason in the "Friday the 13th" movies. After the vows were exchanged, he ordered Holsinger not to kiss his new bride but instead to bite her on the neck.

Lady of Winter {KAN}Queen of the P90 - shooter of the AK47. Claymore expert

FORT COLLINS, Colo. – A giant silvery helium balloonfloated away from a yard in Colorado with a 6-year-old boy believed tobe inside and slowly touched down in a field two hours later with thechild nowhere in sight, setting off a frantic search for the boy.

The saga captivated people around the country as they stopped to watch thejaw-dropping sight on television of the balloon gliding through theair. The flying saucer-like balloon tipped precariously at times beforegliding to the ground in a field, the culmination of a two-hour,50-mile journey through two counties.

Larimer County sheriff's pokeswoman Kathy Messick said one of the boy's two older brothers saw6-year-old Falcon Heene get into a box that was attached to the balloonwith pegs. The box was not found when the balloon landed; videoappeared to show something falling from the balloon at some point afterit launched.

The balloon was owned by the boy's parents, Richard and Mayumi Heene, who are storm chasers and also appeared on the ABC reality show "Wife Swap."

Kevin Kuretich, of the Colorado Division of Emergency Management,said authorities were searching the ground along the path of balloon."We're searching for the boy from the point where this took off towhere it landed," Kuretich said.

He said it also had some kind of electric power unit which was run bydouble-C batteries. He said the balloon did seem to big enough to carrya 6-year-old. Messick also said investigators are looking into everypossibility, including whether the boy was ever in the balloon. Yellowcrime-scene tape was placed around the home.

Jason Humbert saw the balloon land. He said he had gotten a call from hismother in Texas who told him about the balloon. He said was in fieldchecking on oil well when he found himself surrounded by police who hadbeen chasing the balloon, which came to a rest 12 miles northeast of Denver International Airport.

"It looked like an alien space ship you see in those old, old movies. Youknow, those black and white ones. I came down softly. I asked a policeofficer if the boy was OK and he said there was no one in it," Humbertsaid.

Neighbor Bob Licko, 65, said he was leaving home when he heard commotion in the backyard of the family.He said he saw two boys on the roof with a camera, commenting abouttheir brother.

"One of the boys yelled to me that his brother was way up in the air," Licko said.

Licko said the boy's mother seemed distraught and that the boy's father was running around the house.

In a 2007 interview with The Denver Post, Richard Heene described becoming a storm chaserafter a tornado ripped off a roof where he was working as a contractorand said he once flew a plane around Hurricane Wilma's perimeter in2005.

Pursuing bad weather was a family activity with the children coming along as the father sought evidenceto prove his theory that rotating storms create their own magneticfields.

Although Richard said he has no specialized training, they had a computer tracking system in their car and a special motorcycle. The Heene family appeared twice on the ABC reality show "Wife Swap," most recently in February.

"When the Heene family aren't chasing storms, they devote their time toscientific experiments that include looking for extraterrestrials andbuilding a research-gathering flying saucer to send into the eye of thestorm," it says.

While the balloon was airborne, Colorado Army National Guardsent an OH-58 Kiowa helicopter and was preparing to send a Black HawkUH-60 to try to rescue the boy, possibly by lowering someone to theballoon. They also were working with pilots of ultralight aircraft onthe possibility of putting weights on the homemade craft to weigh itdown.

But the balloon landed on its ownin a dirt field. Sheriff's deputies secured it to keep it in place,even tossing shovelfuls of dirt on one edge.The episode led to a brief shutdown of northbound departuresfrom one of the nation's busiest airports, said a controller at the Federal Aviation Administration's radar center in Longmont, Colo.

FAA canceled all northbound takeoffs between 1 p.m. and 1:15 p.m. MDT, said Lyle Burrington, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association representative at the center. The balloon was about 15 miles northwest of the airport at that time.

Before the departure shutdown, controllers had been vectoring planestaking off in that direction away from the balloon, Burrington said.Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown said the agency tracked the balloon through reports from pilots.Neighbor Lisa Eklund described seeing the balloon pass.

"We were sitting eating, out looking where they normally shoot off hot air balloons.My husband said he saw something. It went over our rooftop. Then we sawthe big round balloonish thing, it was spinning," she said."By the time I saw it, it traveled pretty fast," she said.

The story gripped the television news networks, which set asideother programming to follow the balloon and speculate on the safety ofthe boy.

Troy Allan Martin Chester did not appear in the Darwin Magistrates Court this morning but his lawyer pleaded guilty on his behalf to importing prohibited steroids and lying on his arrival form to Customs.

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed)... or some variant.

One student however.... wrote the following..

First... we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time.

So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell... it will not leave.

Therefore... no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell...let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today.

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion...you will go to Hell.

Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion... we can project that all souls go to Hell.

With birth and death rates as they are... we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now...we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same...the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities...

If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell... then the temperature and pressure in Hell willincrease until all Hell breaks loose.

If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell... then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my First year that...

"It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you"... and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night.... then number two must be true.

I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over... it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore extinct......

leaving only Heaven... thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why... last night...

Teresa kept shouting ....

"Oh my God".

Lady of Winter {KAN}Queen of the P90 - shooter of the AK47. Claymore expert

There's rags to riches and then there's rags to mega-riches. Two brothers from Hungary definitely fall into the second category.

Until recently, Geza and Zslot Peladi lived in a cave near Budapest.Completely destitute, the two cave-brothers earned money by gatheringscrap metal and selling candy they found on the street. That allchanged the moment they heard that they stood to inherit a substantialportion of their maternal grandmother's $6.6 billion fortune. (That'sbillion, with a "B.")

According to an article from the New York Post, once the paperwork goes through, the two brothers will share the fortune with their sister in the United States. While some folks who come into obscene amounts of money might buy a plane, throw a party, or commission large oil paintings of themselves, Geza Peladi has a moremodest goal. He would like a "normal life" and to find a woman to share his fortune with. Apparently, it's rather hard to get dates when you live in a cave.

A blog from Ananova features photos of the two brothers and explains their circumstances a bit more. They were told of their mother's death by homeless charityworkers. Geza was quoted as saying that he knew his mother came from awealthy family "but she was a difficult person and severed ties withthem, and then later abandoned us and we lost touch with her and ourfather until she eventually died."

Under German law (where the grandmother lived), the brothers (and the sister) "willinherit the entire estate as they are the closest surviving family members." Once proof of relation to the grandmother is established, they'll be traveling to Germany to start what we can only presume will be a very different kind of life. Best of luck, guys.

skinman {kan}Member

Number of posts : 3169Age : 72City/Country : over here&nbsp : Clan Member

A do it yourself...enthusiast has been banned by his wife from taking on any more tasks after causing about £30.000 of damage. Christopher Andrews... 21... a pensions administrator... has left a trail of destruction in their two-bedroom terrace house in Wiltshire..... south-west England.

While trying to change a washer on a tap... he went up into the loft to look for the stop cock and disconnected two pipes... flooding the house.

He later returned to the loft to look for the television aerial and crashed through the ceiling....... showering plaster on his wife who was ironing.

When he wanted to lay a carpet in the bedroom... he knocked out the light bringing the roll of material into the house.

He cut a large hole in the carpet rather than move the bed.

Andrews once blacked both his eyes when a wheel brace slipped as he tried to change a punctured tyre on the couple’s car.

He ruined a kitchen work surface by trimming off so much of it to make it fit that it ended up far too small.

In his hands the electric drill becomes a dangerous weapon.

He cut his leg badly when he dropped the drill as he tried to rehang a broken garden gate.

Then... while trying to put up a coat rack in the hall... he drilled through an electric cable sending out sparks that set fire to the curtains.

This made him more safety conscious.

When he decided to put some speakers on the walls he turned off the electricity.

Then... unable to understand why his electric drill had stopped working... he took it apart to see if he could fix the fault.

Having failed to find anything wrong with it... he tried to put it back together again but by then he had forgotten where all the pieces went.

He went out and bought another drill and was about to take it back because it didn’t work when his wife arrived home and reminded him that he had turned off the electricity.

Mrs Andrews... a job training manager... said she had had enough.

"Chris will have a go at absolutely anything"... she said.

"But in his case DIY stands for....

Dangerously Incompetent Yob".

skinman {kan}Member

Number of posts : 3169Age : 72City/Country : over here&nbsp : Clan Member

Planning to drink and drive this New Year's? A north Georgia funeral home has a deal for you.Between now and noon Thursday, drivers can visit McGuire, Jennings and MillerFuneral Home in Rome to sign a contract stating they plan to drink ortake drugs and then drive on New Year's Eve. If they die in a wreckthat day, the funeral home will give them a free burial.

Services included in the package are a casket, grave, limousine and preparation of remains.Funeral home officials say the program is designed to save lives by making partygoers think twice about drinking and driving.

skinman {kan}Member

Number of posts : 3169Age : 72City/Country : over here&nbsp : Clan Member

Police in Connecticut say they had ample warning of a bank robbery because thetwo suspects called the bank ahead of time and told an employee to geta bag of money ready.

Police arrested 27-year-old Albert Bailey and an unidentified 16-year-old boy on robbery and threatening charges Tuesday afternoon at a People's United Bank branch in Fairfield.

Sgt. James Perez says the two Bridgeport residents showed up about 10 minutes after making the call and were met by police in the parking lot. Perez told the Connecticut Post the suspects were "not too bright."It's not clear if Bailey and the teen have lawyers. AP

Planning to drink and drive this New Year's? A north Georgia funeral home has a deal for you.Between now and noon Thursday, drivers can visit McGuire, Jennings and MillerFuneral Home in Rome to sign a contract stating they plan to drink ortake drugs and then drive on New Year's Eve. If they die in a wreckthat day, the funeral home will give them a free burial.

Services included in the package are a casket, grave, limousine and preparation of remains.Funeral home officials say the program is designed to save lives by making partygoers think twice about drinking and driving.